What’s NTSC?

NTSC stands for National Television Standards Committee and was approved by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in 1941 as the standard for television broadcasting in the U.S. Since NTSC was originally developed with without consideration for the eventual addition of Color – the implementation of color into the NTSC format has been a weakness of the system, thus the term for NTSC became known by many professionals as “Never Twice The Same Color”.

NTSC is based on a 525-line, 60 fields/30 frames-per-second at 60Hz system for transmission and display of video images. This is an interlaced system in which each frame is scanned in two fields of 262 lines, which is then combined to display a frame of video with 525 scan lines.

NTSC is the official analog video standard in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, some parts of Central and South America, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.